The discussion throughout this specification comes about due to the realization of the inventor(s) and/or the identification of certain prior art problems by the inventor(s). Significant work has been done on making computer “bulletin boards” (or, more recently, “web forums”) more useful by allowing user ratings and threaded conversations. Rated web sites (e.g., slashdot.org, digg.com) allow users to rate comments and articles. However they are not “social networking” web sites; users cannot organise and structure the material on those sites and the “top level” topics are a flat list. Further, the material is public, so users cannot have private or small-group based conversations, and cannot customise or extend the system to be a personal web space.
Numerous “social networking” sites exist, that allow normal users to access the world wide web in ways that only technically literate users were previously able to do. People are able to post web diaries, photos, calendars, encyclopaedia entries and comment on the postings of other users using services (circa 2006) such as Flickr™, Google Blog.'™, Wikipedia™, and MySpace™. In addition, older but similar technologies such as archived mailing lists and discussion forums allow people to have on-line conversations that are preserved and may be viewed and searched at a later date.
All these services suffer from a number of short comings, including without limitation that finding specific information can be laborious due to difficulties of categorisation, there are large quantities of poor quality or irrelevant information and the inability to easily share and search sensitive information. Thus for a user, in using these prior art technologies, there are difficulties, such as: finding relevant information; excluding irrelevant information; modifying inaccurate information; classifying information (in a taxonomic hierarchy); rating information (as useful, or funny, or child safe, or whatever). For example, it is difficult to answer the following questions without working through a lot of “false positives”: show me the most interesting web logs involving poodles in the last 24 hours; show me a summary of the most important emails sent by the marketing department this week; summarize Australian news today, especially mining and resource businesses and ignoring sports other than rugby; summarize the last year's worth of meeting notes for the legal department. In addition, many security related tasks are very difficult for the average user to perform on the open web. For example: share multiple documents securely between multiple parties; show personal photos to my family only; send an email to a recruiter from the office without it being scanned by the corporate mail filter; cast an anonymous vote on a web forum.
It has been realized by the inventor(s) that these problems are caused by existing systems being relational (i.e., a flat network of arbitrarily connected nodes), usually unrated, difficult to summarize, and often insecure. Any discussion of documents, devices, acts, or knowledge in this specification is included to explain the context of the invention. It should not be taken as an admission that any of the material forms a part of the prior art base or the common general knowledge in the relevant art in Australia or elsewhere on or before the priority date of the disclosure and claims herein.
One aspect of the present invention is to alleviate problems associated with retrieving and/or sharing information via internet communications. A further aspect of the present invention is to alleviate at least one disadvantage associated with the prior art.